This section is intended to provide a background to the various embodiments of the technology described in this disclosure. The description in this section may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and/or claims of this disclosure and is not admitted to be prior art by the mere inclusion in this section.
To efficiently page terminal devices, a so-called Distance Based Paging (DBP) method has been proposed and used in cellular networks. When the DBP method is applied in a cellular network, each RBS in the cellular network broadcasts an RUR. As a result, a terminal device, which registered its location with the network as a location of an RBS (denoted as a first RBS), must have received an RUR broadcast by the first RBS. If the terminal device moves away from the first RBS for a distance larger than the RUR, it will send out a Route Update Message (RUM). Upon receipt of the RUM at another RBS (denoted as a second RBS), the registered location of the terminal device will be updated with the second RBS's location. In case the terminal device is needed to be paged, all RBSs located in a paging area defined by a radius from the latest updated location of the terminal device (i.e., the location of the RBS which receives the RUM most recently) would send out paging messages, wherein the radius is equal to an RUR broadcast by the RBS which receives the RUM most recently.
In the prior art, RURs are manually configured for RBSs by network operators. In a case where the topology of a network changes (such as when additional RBSs are deployed in the network, when one or more RBSs are relocated in the network, or the like), the RURs for the RBSs are manually adjusted. The manual configuration and adjustment of RURs impose heavy burdens on the network operators, particularly for large-scale networks including hundreds or thousands of RBSs.
To ensure a high paging success rate, a network operator tends to set a large RUR for an RBS. Sometimes, such a strategy may cause an undesirable scenario, where the RUR defines a paging area centered at the RBS and covering a neighboring RBS whose Control CHannel (CCH) is busy, as illustrated in FIG. 1. In such a scenario, if a terminal device is paged in the paging area, the CCH of the neighboring RBS might be overloaded by paging messages intended for the terminal device and communications to/from the neighboring RBS might be adversely impacted and even interrupted.
Occasionally, for an RBS, the network operator might set a relatively small RUR which defines a paging area centered at the RBS and excluding a neighboring RBS whose Access CHannel (ACH) is busy, as illustrated in FIG. 2. In such a case, if one or more terminal devices move into the neighboring RBS out of the paging area, the ACH of the neighboring RBS might be undesirably overloaded by RUR messages sent from the terminal devices.